A Flemish walled town is the setting for a scene populated with people all busily engaged in a variety of seemingly absurd and unrelated activities. The meaning of each little episode only becomes clear when one realizes that the artist has used the actions of ordinary folk to give pictorial expression, often in very literal terms, to popular period sayings or proverbs.

Proverbs and sayings have been collected in compendia since time immemorial, but interest in them reached a new peak in the sixteenth century. Broadly speaking, the proverbs in this image address the theme of the sins and follies of mankind. Brueghel offers an image of the peasant that is at once comical and brutally caricatured, but also heroically monumental.

The career of Pieter Breughel the Younger was built largely on the reputation of his famous father, Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Although no more than four or five years old in 1569 when the elder Brueghel died, the son was nonetheless able to develop a detailed knowledge of his father’s oeuvre. Demand for his father’s works fueled interest in Pieter the Younger’s copies and adaptations. The present painting is derived from a composition by his father dated 1559 (Gemäldegalerie in Berlin). The original painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder was executed before Pieter the Younger was even born and almost forty years before the latter produced his earliest surviving dated copy. Ten signed versions of the son’s The Flemish Proverbs are known: four large versions on panel, four on canvas, and two smaller variants on copper; none are identical.

Surprisingly few details survive regarding the life of Pieter Breughel the Younger. Since his father died before his birth, the Younger may have received his first training from his maternal grandmother, Mayken Verhulst, who was a painter and had been married to Pieter Coecke van Aelst. Pieter the Younger became a master in the Antwerp painters’ guild in 1584–1585 and trained at least nine pupils. In 1588, he married Elizabeth Goddelet and their eldest son, Pieter III, also became a painter. Pieter the Younger enjoyed a long and productive career that lasted more than half a century. He died in Antwerp in 1637 or 1638.

Key to The Flemish Proverbs by Pieter Brueghel II

1. She tightly ties up the devil on top of a cushion (she is a formidable woman, she is a shrew).

2. He is a pillar licker (he is a hypocrite).

3. She carries fire in one hand and water in the other. (She is false, or even: she blows hot and cold).

4. This time it’s the sow that pulls out the stopper. (Everything is going badly here, everyone does exactly as they want).

5. He grills the herring to get the spawn. (he is someone who squanders).

6. This time his herring won’t cook (this time he is unsuccessful).

7. He has a cake on his head. (He is unlucky).

8. To fall between two stools.

9. a) To find the dog in the cooking-pot (to arrive too late, to go dinnerless); b) In an open pot or yawning hole, the dog sticks its nose everywhere (everyone is interested in a badly kept secret).

10. By the sign of the scissors. (hair cut here).

11. To always gnaw on the same bone. (To always set one’s heart on the same thing).